Rather than increase subject drift on a thread I started
"UNIX on (not quite bare) System/370", here's a new thread.
Since the TUHS archive seems to now include documentation,
I decided to take a look and see if the earliest UNIX manual I have
is in the archive:
It was given to me by a friend at Stevens Tech in Hoboken NJ (c. 1980)
who had graduated, and worked for AT&T.
It's hole punched for a four ring binder
(I found an unused Bell System Project Telstar binder to put it in).
The cover page has:
Upper left corner:
Bell Telephone Laboratories Incorperated
PROGRAM APPLICATION INSTRUCTION
Upper right corner:
PA-1C300-01
Section 1
Issue 1, January 1976
AT&TCo SPCS
Center:
UNIX PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL
Program Generic PG-1C300 Issue 2
Published by the UNIX Support Group
January, 1976
The preface starts with:
This document is published as part of the UNIX Operating System Program Generic,
PG-1C300 Issue 2. The development of the Program Generic is the result of the
efforts of the members of the UNIX Support Group, supervised by J.F. Maranzano
and composed of: R. B. Brant, J. Feder, C. D. Perez. T. M. Raleigh, R. E. Swift,
G. C. Vogel and I. A. Winheim.
and ends with
For corrections and comments please contact C. D. Perez, MH 2C-423, Extension
6041.
Not knowing who else I could ask, I brought it to a Boston Usenix (in
the 90's or oughts), and asked DMR if he could identify it. He said
it was an early supported UNIX, and he signed the preface page for me.
The manual has sections I through VIII; all manual pages start with page -1-
I found https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/unix_program_description_ja…
with cover page:
UNIX PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Program Generic PG-1C300 Issue 2
Published by the UNIX Support Group
January 1976
contents:
NUMBER ISSUE TITLE
PD-1C301-01 1 Operating System
PD-1C302-01 1 Device Drivers Section 1
PD-1C303-01 1 Device Drivers Section 2
And consists of descriptions of kernel functions.
So it seems likely that my manual is a companion to that.
I have a Brother printer/scanner, but the paper is fragile, so unless
it's of immediate and burning value to someone, it's unlikely to rise
to the top of my ever-static list of documents to scan....
But if someone has specific questions I can look up, let me know....
>> What was the physical form of this book? Was it a "perfect bound"
>> book?
> The HRW copies I have are perfect bound. But I can't remember if they
> were 3-hole punched as well.
The Holt Rinehart edition was 3-hole punched. The original V7
(and its predecessors) were prepared for AT&T standard 4-hole binders, but
distributed in Accopress binders that used only 2 of the 4.
4-hole paper was punched 2" and 3 3/8" from top and bottom of 11" paper.
This reduced the stress concentration that makes the isolated end holes in
3-hole paper vulnerable to tearing out. It was a let-down when AT&T
eventually acceded to a sort of loose-leaf Gresham's law and switched to 3
holes.
Doug
The Plan 9 C compiler must predate Plan 9 and therefore it must
have been created on Research Unix.
The v10 manual doesn't mention them, fair enough, they document
Unix and not Plan 9, but they do say that rc(1) is the Plan 9
shell...
Research Unix of the time ran on VAX. A natural question arises,
was VAX the original target of the Plan 9 compilers? Where is it?
Why isn't it mentioned anywhere?
If VAX was never a target, then what was the original purpose of
these compilers and how were they tested on a target that Research
Unix never ran on?
One might think they might have been used for the Jerq/Blit/DMD-5620,
but no, the Unix manual documents a different compiler used for
these (which is distinct from the main C compiler).
The Plan 9 compilers seems to have appeared out of thin air, but
this certainly can't be the case.
--
Aram Hăvărneanu
Wanted to share this in case anyone is in the market for one. Someone's posted a 3B2/400 to eBay along with many documents and some peripherals and such. Kicker is it's $2,000 altogether...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/186237940947
Way outside what I'm wiling to sink into one, although a 3B2 would be very nice to have around. Anywho, figured I'd spread the word in case someone in the far flung UNIX-verse is seeking one and has the funds to spare.
- Matt G.
Got some exciting stuff in the mail today, and for once it isn't going to amount to sitting in front of a scanner for hours:
https://archive.org/details/5ess-switch-dk5e-cd-1999-05
After the link is the April/May 1999 issue of the 5ESS-Switch DK5E-CD, a collection of documents and schematics concerning the 5ESS-2000 variant of the 5ESS switch, as supported at the time by Lucent-Bell Labs. Of particular UNIX interest is the following:
https://ia601200.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/12/items/5ess-swi…
This is the November 1998 issue of the 5ESS-2000 Switch UNIX RTR Operating System Reference Manual (235-700-200, Issue 7.00). From the text it appears to be a descendant of the standard UNIX literature, although it only contains the intro, basic info, section 1, as well as a section on administration as well as an EMACS paper. It alludes to a more complete manual although I have not located that in this document collection (granted I'm busy on a work thing right now, just taking the time to upload and spread the word ATM.)
There's probably plenty of other relevant stuff in there, plus plenty of content regarding the 5ESS and 3B20D generally. These CDs were included with a paper binder of installation and identification info. The binder appears to be largely for training programs and I have yet to verify whether its contents are included in these CDs or the two supplement each other. Either way, this should present plenty of leads on more potential sources of 5ESS, 3B20D, and maybe UNIX RTR stuff. Unfortunately the discs only seem to contain documents, there wasn't the holy grail of a snapshot of UNIX RTR in there that I was kinda hoping might be bumping around. Thus the hunt for 3B20 UNIX continues...
- Matt G.
P.S. This is a bit more modern than what I've been dealing with generally, hopefully given the current state of 5ESS and Nokia-Bell Labs seeming to be winding things down, that means this isn't a problem to have put up. I just urge caution on any use of this stuff that even remotely smells of commercial activities, but I probably don't have to tell anyone that. Just covering my bases.
[TUHS bcc, moved to COFF]
On Thursday, January 4th, 2024 at 10:26 AM, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote:
> For whatever reason, intel makes it difficult to impossible to remove
> the ME in later generations.
Part of me wonders if the general computing industry is starting to cheat off of the smartphone sector's homework, this phenomenon where whole critical components of a hardware device you literally own are still heavily controlled and provisioned by the vendor unless you do a whole bunch of tinkering to break through their stuff and "root" your device. That I can fully pay for and own a "computer" and I am not granted full root control over that device is one of the key things that keeps "smart" devices besides my work issued mobile at arms length.
For me this smells of the same stuff, they've gotten outside of the lane of *essential to function* design decisions and instead have now put in a "feature" that you are only guaranteed to opt out of by purchasing an entirely different product. In other words, the only guaranteed recourse if a CPU has something like this going on is to not use that CPU, rather than as the device owner having leeway to do what you want. Depends on the vendor really, some give more control than others, but IMO there is only one level of control you give to someone who has bought and paid for a complete device: unlimited. Anything else suggests they do not own the device, it is a permanently leased product that just stops requiring payments after a while, but if I don't get the keys, I don't consider myself to own it, I'm just borrowing it, kinda like how the Bell System used to own your telephone no matter how many decades it had been sitting on your desk.
My two cents, much of this can also be said of BIOS, UEFI, anything else that gets between you and the CPUs reset vector. Is it a nice option to have some vendor provided blob to do your DRAM training, possibly transition out of real mode, enumerate devices, whatever. Absolutely, but it's nice as an *option* that can be turned off should I want to study and commit to doing those things myself. I fear we are approaching an age where the only way you get reset vector is by breadboarding your own thing. I get wanting to protect users from say bricking the most basic firmware on a board, but if I want to risk that, I should be completely free to do so on a device I've fully paid for. For me the key point of contention is choice and consent. I'm fine having this as a selectable option. I'm not fine with it becoming an endemic "requirement." Are we there yet? Can't say, I don't run anything serious on x86-family stuff, not that ARM and RISC-V don't also have weird stuff like this going on. SBI and all that are their own wonderful kettle of fish.
BTW sorry that's pretty rambly, the lack of intimate user control over especially smart devices these days is one of the pillars of my gripes with modern tech. Only time will tell how this plays out. Unfortunately the general public just isn't educated enough (by design, not their own fault) on their rights to really get a big push on a societal scale to change this. People just want I push button I get Netflix, they'll happily throw all their rights in the garbage over bread and circuses....but that ain't new...
- Matt G.
Hi,
I've found myself wondering about partitions inside of BSD disk labels.
Specifically, when and where was the convention that "a" is root, "b" is
swap, etc?
I also understand the "c" partition to be the entire disk, unless it
isn't, at which point it's the entire slice (BIOS / MBR partition)
containing the BSD disklabel and "d" is the entire disk.
I also found something last night that indicated that OpenBSD uses disk
labels somewhat differently than FreeBSD.
Aside: This is one of the dangers of wondering how something curious
came to be and why it came to be when working on 10-15 year old FreeBSD
systems.
--
Grant. . . .
[TUHS as Bcc]
I just saw sad news from Bertrand Meyer. Apparently, Niklaus Wirth
passed away on the 1st. :-(
I think it's fair to say that it is nearly impossible to overstate his
influence on modern programming.
- Dan C.
Disk sections (I don't think anyone in Research called them
partitions--certainly the Research manuals didn't) were
originally defined in the device driver, not by data on the
disk. In those days, system management included recompiling
stuff, including the OS kernel, and it was not unusual for
sites to edit hp.c or whatnot to adjust things to local
preference.
There was nothing magic about the mapping between device
names and minor device numbers either; the system came with
certain conventions on the original tape, but it was not
at all uncommon to change them.
By the time I arrived at the first Unix site I ever helped
run, in a physics group at Caltech, we already used a different
naming convention: a BSD-like ddNs, where dd was a driver
name, N the physical drive unit number, s a section letter.
I don't know whether that was borrowed from BSD (it must have
started during the 3BSD era, since I started there in mid-1980
and 4BSD appears to have been released late in that year).
Looking at my archival copy of that much-locally-hacked
source tree, I see that we later moved the definitions of
all the disk-section tables to a single file compiled at
system-configuration time (we used a USG-like scheme that
compiled most of the system into libraries, rather than
compiling every file separately for each target system a
la V7 and BSD). That simplified handling our somewhat-
complicated disk topology: all but system disks were connected
through System Industries 9400 disk controllers, which were
a neat design (each controller could interface to as many as
four hosts and four disks) but in practice were not always
reliable. On one hand, we arranged for one disk to be used
in parts by our main time-sharing VAX and a subsidiary PDP-11/45,
making the 11/45 cheaper to keep around; on the other, the
main VAX had two paths to each of its disks, through different
SI controllers, so when an SI controller conked out we could
run without it until the service guys fixed it. (Each disk
was dual-ported, as was common in the SMD world, hence
connected to two controllers.)
Reliability took rather more work in those days.
A different data point: by the time I moved from California
to New Jersey and joined 1127, Research was also using a
different naming scheme for disk sections. By then the
internal naming convention was e.g. ra17 for physical unit
1, section 7; by further convention 7 (the highest-numbered
section). At some point a little later we added an ioctl
to set the starting block and size of a particular section
on a particular drive, but we never went to having the OS
itself try to find a label and trust its contents (something
that still makes the 1980s part of me feel a little creepy,
though 21st century me has come to terms with it).
Norman Wilson
Certified old fart
Toronto ON
